Endangered Species

I saw the story earlier today on the news as it unfolded, pretty damn horrific. It appears he took the weapon from his parents collection before going to the school he used to attend.
Apparently most of the victims are female aged between 14-16, they dont know if they were targetted that way or if it was just the way events unfolded.
The police responded to the incident within 2 minutes but the gunmen got away killing two more and hijaking another before fleeing again, when he shot two more people before finally being hunted down by the police, being shot at and injured he then took his own life.

There are also reports of a large number of the children at the school suffering broken bones from jumping out of windows. Must of been a very scary situation.

Administrator

I really think every physically fit teacher needs to be required to have gun training and carry a gun at all times. The rest need to strongly consider doing it.

For those who say "well not all teachers are comfortable doing that" I would tell them they are going to need to get comfortable and fast. Who's going to go into a school with a gun if they know every teacher is armed.

So many of these shooting sprees could be prevented if teachers were able to fight back.

In colleges I personally believe every student who is legally able to own and carry a gun should be able to do so. There is a reason these people who go on shooting sprees pick places like schools where most if not all of the people there will be unarmed.

/ˈɪzəˌbɛl/ pink 5

A teenage gunman who shot dead 15 people, including nine students and three teachers at his former school in southwestern Germany, killed himself after a shoot-out with police on Wednesday.

The shooter – which the Germany’s biggest tabloid newspaper Bild has identified as 17-year-old Tim Kretschmer – prompted the authorities to seal off the small town of Winnenden after he fled from the bloodbath at the Albertville secondary school.

He murdered eight school children aged between 14 and 16, as well as three teachers at the school, storming two classrooms seemingly at random. Several other people were injured, one of whom died later from their wounds.

He then fled, prompting police to seal off the small town which is located some 20 kilometres northeast of Stuttgart. But he had run through the grounds of a nearby psychiatric clinic where he shot dead a member of staff before hijacking a car and forcing the driver to head towards Stuttgart.

A police spokesman said later that once Kretschmer decided to flee, the planning he had done was no longer relevant.

A massive manhunt was under way, with hundreds of armed police commandos and snipers in black body armour on his trail, assisted by helicopters and dog handler teams.

"The whole time police were on his trail," local police chief Konrad Gelden told reporters.

When he hit a traffic jam caused by the police operation, he forced the driver to turn around and head north again, ending up in Wendling. Taking a sharp corner the car came off the road and Kretschmer ran into a small trading estate.

There he embarked upon a shoot-out with armed police units which had surrounded the area. Two passersby were killed and two police officers were seriously injured before the gunman was shot in the leg by police before he then apparently turned his weapon on himself.

"He was constantly reloading his weapon," Gelden said.

Kretschmer is said to have entered the secondary school at around 9:30 am on Wednesday. He reportedly said nothing before starting to shoot.

A police spokesman has told reporters that he was known to the authorities – and that his parents legally owned up to 18 firearms.

His mother’s house has been searched by officers and she was questioned. Reports suggest one of the weapons was missing from the family's collection.

Around 1,000 pupils at several nearby schools were either evacuated or locked in classrooms although some had jumped out of windows to escape the chaos. The school’s website which said he had graduated last year, has crashed.

“This is the biggest catastrophe that can happen to a school,” said Helmut Rau, Baden-Württemberg’s education minister. “The soul of the school is wounded deeply.”

Rescue services flooded into the town of 27,000 and the authorities closed much of Winnenden’s centre.

German President Horst Köhler expressed his shock at the killings. “My wife and I were filled with horror and sadness upon hearing about the rampage in Winnenden. Our thoughts are with the victims and their friends and family,” he said in Berlin.

Germany has been shocked by a number of fatal school shootings in recent years.

In February 2002, a 22-year-old gunman killed the headmaster and seriously injured another person in a vocational training centre he attended at Freising, near Munich.

Two months later, 16 people were killed at a high-school in Erfurt in eastern Germany, by a 19-year-old former student, who then killed himself.

In November 2006, a former student at a vocational school in Lower Saxony in northwestern Germany went a shooting spree in the establishment, injuring 37 people before turning his gun on himself.

No Custom Title Exists

Why ain't kids smart enough to talk to their personal issues to their parents, teachers and other people who could help them rather than go on a rage killing innocent children, and I wonder what do they get out of this? Their own death, if they are planning to die like this, they might as well kill themselves rather then the innocent children.

With the shootouts that have been happening in the American schools and as well in Germany now, the schools should enforce the police check up in the mornings including the metal detector machine that is used at the airports.

As for the teachers in schools, they should have some sport of special training, or maybe even carry a gun with them, and have it under the desk or something as well as a Taser gun.

Registered Member

I don't know more about the details than others posted here already. There is just one thing I'd like to add, which I heard in the news: Gunshot inflicted wounds are so uncommon and irregular in Germany that most doctors are not even prepared to deal with them, which is why doctors by the Bundeswehr (army) have been involved in the treatment of survivors.

I don't agree that arming teachers and turning schools into prison-like high security areas is a solution. On the contrary, I suppose this would do by far more harm than improve the situation -- just imagine the psychological pressure on both students and teachers, and the resulting psychological problems, not even mentioning the many accidents that would necessarily result. And when teachers, who are supposed to be role models, start carrying guns to underline their authority, this actually encourages students to "fight back" with their own gun violence.

We shouldn't blow incidents like this out of proportion and remember that millions of students go to school every day, without such incidents occuring. The costs would be in no reasonable relation to the benefits.

This whole "fight back"-mentality is exactly what causes incidents like this, and the high degree of that thinking in the US is the reason why gun violence is extremely more common in the US than in Europe. Why do you think students did things like that? Simply because they believed "fighting back" against alleged/imaginative injustice they experienced at school is legitimate, also by violence.

When even role models like Chuck Norris support gun violence to fight and topple democracy, implicitly justifying massacres like the Oklahoma City bombing and promoting simple black/white concepts of the enemy and glorification of gun violence in his movies, you don't need to wonder when eventually, a teen (who is in an age when many students feel alienated and outcast by society) takes up a gun and fights his alleged "enemies".

The only reasonable course of action should be prevention. The German school system is really fucked up -- there is hardly any psychological care and individual support for students with psychological or medical problems. Teachers don't feel responsible for their students, if someone fails to conform, they get a bad grade and that's it. Nobody asks them about their family situation, possible problems like shyness or ADS and so on. If the school systems was changed to allow for more individual account of students' problems, frustration that may lead to incidents like this one in the most extreme case, may be recognized and relieved before it really becomes a problem.

Administrator

Sim you could be on to something there, but I've done a lot of research on school and other shootings and honestly it's rarely about "fighting back".

Take Columbine for example. The kids felt left out. Their suicide letter said they hated the other kids for never including them in anything. Fighting back? Maybe, but not against authority. They just wanted to make other people as miserable as they were. They wanted to cause pain and anguish to those who had what they didn't have. Happy lives.

We can discuss arming teachers forever but in the end it won't happen because there are too many people that think all guns are bad. The truth is we live in a world with guns. We can't get rid of them. People who want them will always be able to get them. People who are planning on dying anyway aren't worried about any consequences because in their mind (if their plan goes as planned) they won't be around for them. It's selfish but it's the reality we live in. Sometimes the only way to stop these people is with a gun. If somebody walks into your classroom spraying bullets, they need to be stopped as quickly as possible. The situation is literally a war zone. Guns are required to fight people with guns. Especially if those people are intent on killing as many people as possible. You can't reason with people like that.

In the end, most school shootings could have been much less tragic if a teacher pulled out a gun and shot the killer in the head. Either the teachers need to be armed (or have the option of being armed) or schools really do have to have armed guards in every hall at all times.